TOP 40 DEBUT: January 5, 1980
PEAK POSITION: #11 (February 23, 1980)
For a good decade or so, you couldn’t throw a rock into a crowd of singer-songwriters without hitting “the next Dylan.” Donovan received the mantle first, way back in 1965, shortly before getting his ass handed to him by the actual Dylan in D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary Don’t Look Back. And in the years following, the tag got applied to a who’s-who of white-guys-with-guitars: Gordon Lightfoot, John Prine, Loudon Wainwright III, even Bruce Springsteen. One Jersey-born exception aside, none of these artists ever came close to achieving the culture-shattering heights of Dylan himself. But the vast majority managed to carve out singular, unique careers on their own terms, long after the media hype subsided. And that’s exactly what happened to the “new Dylan” of 1978, Steve Forbert.
Mississippi-born Forbert got his start performing solo sets in NYC clubs in the late Seventies. He played CBGB’s armed with only a guitar and harmonica; he also gigged at Folk City, where Dylan had made his professional debut back in 1961. So on a superficial level, it probably made sense for music journalists to connect the dots between the two. But I don’t hear much Bobby Zimmerman in Forbert’s earnest, irony-free delivery. And I certainly can’t recall a song in Dylan’s entire oeuvre as wide-eyed, and open, and absolutely joyful as “Romeo’s Tune.”
The great paradox of “Romeo’s Tune” is how much work it took to create something that sounds so effortless. Forbert wrote an early version in time for Alive On Arrival, his 1978 debut, but held it back, fearful another love song would interrupt the album’s narrative. A demo recorded with most of the same Arrival players felt lacking, incomplete. Over the next year, Forbert kept rewriting. He dropped the song into occasional live sets, purely to gauge the reaction. Thanks to the advice of Linda Stein, his manager at the time, he eventually added the third and final verse.
In preparation for his follow-up album, Jackrabbit Slim, Forbert paired with producer John Simon, whose credits included Songs Of Leonard Cohen, Simon & Garfunkel’s Bookends, and The Band’s Music From Big Pink. And together, they tackled the song again. And again. And again. First in Nashville, then in New York City, then Nashville once more. Everyone at Nemperor Records smelled a hit. Forbert and Simon smelled a hit. But they had to chase it down.
The master take of “Romeo’s Tune” finally arrived on the first day back in Tennessee’s Quadrophonic Studios. Same setup, same players: The only change from the previous Nashville session was the inclusion of drummer Roger Clark. This time, something clicked. Clark and returning bassist Bob Wray were both studio vets from Muscle Shoals’ FAME Recording Studios, and together, they landed on a gently loping rhythm absent from all previous incarnations. Session guitarist Jon Goin played those in-the-pocket leads; Forbert’s pal Paul Errico handled organ. And the dancing piano line that provides the song’s main hook? That came courtesy of the legendary Bobby Ogdin, keyboardist for Elvis Presley during the last year of his life.
With all pieces finally in place, the assembled studio band nailed the song, live on the spot, in just three takes. Listening to playback afterwards, everyone agreed they’d captured something special, and Forbert asked engineer Gene Eichelberger to record a rough mixdown on the spot. Weeks later, John Simon was back in New York City, doing final mixes for Jackrabbit Slim, and realized he couldn’t improve on Eichelberger’s in-the-moment effort. The released version of “Romeo’s Tune” is that original rough mix.
“Romeo” himself never actually appears in the lyrics, and there’s no indication of his background, or status, or long-term ambitions. Which is exactly how it should be. The love Forbert describes in “Romeo’s Tune” is young, fleeting, and in-the-moment, the age-old story of escaping the world with your lover as told by everyone from Leonard Bernstein to Carly Rae Jepsen. It’s pure fantasy, and Forbert sells it beautifully. His yelps of joy are exclamation points to cap every chorus, while a wonderfully evocative lyric like “Bring me Southern kisses from your room” is basically star-crossed love in miniature. It says nothing. It means everything. I could live in its world forever.
Steve Forbert was twenty-one when “Romeo’s Tune” peaked at #11 in February 1980. He never sniffed the Top 40 again, one of the decade’s first one-hit wonders—but minus the name recognition (and infamy) of a Kajagoogoo or Dexy’s Midnight Runners. But he parlayed that early success into a long, fruitful career, with more than twenty albums to his name and legendary status within the country songwriting community. And in a Songfacts interview from 2012, Forbert had no regrets about the way his path unfolded: “"Maybe I didn't turn into the kind of monster hitmaker that Stevie Wonder is, but I was able to go my own way… I was allowed to make my own mistakes, my own choices, my own good ideas."
On the Jackrabbit Slim album sleeve, “Romeo’s Tune” is dedicated to the late Florence Ballard, the original Supremes singer pushed aside by Diana Ross who died tragically at age 32. Certainly, the young man who wrote that dedication could’ve succumbed to a similar bitterness after his commercial fortunes took a downturn. Yet Forbert never harbored resentment towards his one fluke hit. If anything, he viewed “Romeo’s Tune” as a gift, the lottery ticket that allowed him to craft his career on his own terms. And years later, he even confessed to the song’s actual inspiration: a girl from his hometown of Meridan, Mississippi. And yeah, “she was real pretty.”
GRADE: 8/10
BONUS BITS: Sadly, “Romeo’s Tune” hasn’t left much of a cultural footprint over the ensuing decades. The only cover of note belongs to Keith Urban, a beyond-faithful interpretation taken from his 2008 Greatest Hits: 18 Kids album. (Insert obvious “country radio now sounds like pop radio from 30 years ago” comment here.)
I WANT MY MTV: No video for the song, but Steve Forbert appeared on television screens a few years later as Cyndi Lauper’s groom-to-be in the iconic clip for “Girls Just Want To Have Fun.” (“Girls” will be appearing in this column eventually.)